Doom
Machionic/moviestillsdb
All the credit in the world to director Andrzej Bartkowiak for trying something different. Near the end of the film, Doom leans into its source material and presents us with a five-minute sequence shot entirely in the first person. If you’ve ever wanted to know what it’s like to watch someone else play a video game in a movie theater, this is your chance.
Outside of this action scene, the rest of the film is mostly a forgettable collection of reheated tropes and cliches from other, better science fiction movies. Still, the video game premise is bonkers enough that an adaptation is worth another try.
Super Mario Bros.
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You have to forgive the creative team behind 1993’s Super Mario Bros. a little bit, if only because they were doing something that hadn’t been done before. As a medium, video games were still fairly new, and translating a 2D, 8-bit platformer into a 90-minute feature film isn’t as intuitive as one would think. Still, I’m not sure how you look at a game about two plumbers who traverse a colorful mushroom kingdom to rescue a princess and defeat an evil turtle-like Koopa king and come up with…this.
In a vacuum, the movie itself is whatever. A forgettable C- experience. As a Super Mario Bros. movie, though, it’s just baffling.
Double Dragon
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People seem to have forgotten how big of a deal the original Double Dragon was in the late 80s and early 90s arcade scene. The game put the co-op beat ‘em up genre on the map and was the highest-grossing arcade game in America in 1988 and 1989. Sure, there’s not much story to build off of, but the formula was there for a big muscled-up action film. Two tough guy brothers punch and kick punks en route to saving the girl.
How you get from that to this 1994 adaptation is a head-scratcher. No disrespect to stars Mark Dacascos and Scott Wolf, but that bit of casting as Billy and Jimmy Lee was the first of many, many mistakes.
Resident Evil Films
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You could populate most of this list with entries in director Paul W.S. Andersons’ Resident Evil franchise, but for variety’s sake, we’ll lump them all together. To be clear, these six films have an audience, and they have proven to be financially successful. But they are also hollow, lifeless, noisy exercises in paint-by-numbers action and bad CGI.
Resident Evil is a beloved video game franchise as famous for its horror atmosphere and genuinely frightening moments as it is for its wooden dialogue and insanely convoluted storytelling. It’s odd that Anderson seems to have exclusively adapted the latter and never even bothered with the former.
Wing Commander
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Younger readers might not be aware of how big of a deal the Wing Commander franchise was to PC gamers in the 1990s. It pushed the space flight simulator genre light years forward and was one of the few games to actually have decent live action FMV cutscenes. Unfortunately, the Wing Commander movie is a dull, lifeless experience with bad special effects and a cliche-ridden screenplay.
When the FMV scenes from Wing Commander 3 are more exciting than a theatrically released feature film something has gone terribly wrong. The film’s only appeal might be to Scooby Doo fans who can’t get enough of Freddie Prinze Jr and Matthew Lillard’s on-screen chemistry.
Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li
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This movie feels like it was cast by pulling names out of a hat. The actors have all been good in other projects, but in Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li every single one of them is completely miscast. As a Street Fighter property, the movie lacks quality fight scenes. As an actual movie, it lacks quality…everything else.
That’s not to say that the movie isn’t fun, though, as it crosses that sublime barrier into the world of “so bad it’s good.” Chris Klein’s performance in particular is a must-see but likely not for reasons that he nor director Andrzej Bartkowiak intended.
Max Payne
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It made sense to attempt a live-action adaptation of Max Payne. The game was lauded for its slick visual style, and the signature “bullet time” action was already something borrowed from another successful film. Unfortunately, the movie proved to be a major disappointment.
Take one look at the poster and you can see that the movie cribs liberally from Sin City. The movie is flashy at times, but mostly it’s all sizzle and no steak. Things are significantly dragged down by Mark Wahlberg who goes through the motions as if he was forced to be on set at gunpoint.
Mortal Kombat: Annihilation
Machionic/moviestillsdb
Producer Lawrence Kasanoff said in later interviews that the film was released theatrically with many of the effects shot left unfinished. If you’ve had the bad fortune of having sat through all 95 minutes of this movie then you would be inclined to agree with him.
The first Mortal Kombat film is not great by any stretch of the imagination, but compared to Annihilation it’s practically Citizen Kane. The problem seems to be ambition outpacing ability. They added more of everything — characters, fights, effects, locations — and in doing so made the movie an unfocused boring mess.
It took over twenty years to get another Mortal Kombat movie. It wasn’t very good either.
Postal
moviestillsdb
Incredibly, a director was able to carve out a career for himself by making low-quality, low-budget adaptations of middling video games. German filmmaker Uwe Boll did just that.
He is a punchline now, but for a time in the early 2000s, Boll was a threat to video game fans everywhere that your favorite title might get the Uwe treatment.
As a game, Postal is edge lord trash, so in one way you could argue this is Boll’s most successful adaptation. The film attempts to be political satire, but any attempt at having something to say is hampered by the lack of talent and intelligence behind the creative team.
Alone in the Dark
smooth5/moviestillsdb
Our final entry on this list could be no other film than Uwe Boll’s crowning achievement in disaster, Alone in the Dark. What an absolute mess. It would almost be forgivable if the film was “so bad it’s good” but even at a brief 96 minutes it’s just so unfathomably dull that it can’t even be recommended as something to laugh at. The only emotion to experience here is pity. This comes for the crew, yourself, and especially for Christian Slater, Tara Reid, and Stephen Dorff for having their names on the poster. Boll and the producers who enable him should be ashamed of themselves for the tangible damage that man has had on the very concept of adapting a video game into a movie.
Honestly, disregard the rest of what you’ve just read. This list should just be a transcription of Uwe’s filmography.
